10-27-2011, 12:12 AM
(10-26-2011, 11:24 PM)Lissa Wrote: And simply, how do you account for nearly a million subs going in active in just 6 months of a new expansion when the game was gaining subscribtions up until that expansion came out. Age might have something to do with it, but definitely not everything.
They lost a million subs because they made the dungeon content too hard. Players across the board came into Cataclysm and found that the content that filled up 70+% of their game time had become so hair-pullingly frustrating to do that they stopped bothering and, in turn, found that what they had left no longer validated a monthly subscription.
Add to that the fact that the first Cataclysm tier of raids had horrendously allocated loot tables and players, like myself, who played predominantly for raid content were not feeling adequately rewarded for their game time solely from raids.
Players on the other end of the spectrum who would spend most of their time socializing, achievement hunting, or whatever found that flying around the world doing Archeology ad nauseum wasn't rewarding enough to validate their subscription either.
And then we come back to the fact that the dungeon content, the content for either group that would soften the boredom and pull each group through to the next week, just made everyone want to stab their eyes out.
If you want to keep subs in a game like WoW you need to have a good balance between all of these aspects of the game so that when a player gets burnt out on one they can fill their time with alternate activities. When the players are only left with one of those aspects 90% of them will decide it's not worth their money.